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usually i try to restrict this to sexually transmitted diseases, but some of the others are just so musical. Syphilis, it should be noted, would make a lovely boy's name, but that is outside the scope of this list.

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ok, i am actually going to argue with halitosis. hali, maybe, but not halitosis. that doesn't sound like a baby girl's name at all, even with unfortunate names like mackenzie and madison becoming popular.

I think it works for boys, hence Syphilis, it just seems slightly funnier for girls. Girl's names are just meant to sound sweeter, like Cholera, without self consciousness of the whole death by diarrhea thing. Bilharzia Sciatica and Acne don't work for me as much because they don't have the nearly saccharine sweet sound I'm looking for, but I can still see them.

Diseases tend to have latinate names ending in 'a', which makes them sound feminine.

For some reason the few unfeminine disease-names like mumps don't suggest themselves as names for boys. Flu, maybe?

I think there's a greater flexibility and variety in the naming of girls; it seems to me that society is more accepting of novelty and variation in girls' names than in boys'. So it's not as hard to imagine a world where gonorrhea is a girls' name as it is to imagine a world where colic is a boys' name.